Alvin Toffler published his book The
Third Wave in 1980. He classifies societies by the way they
produce wealth:
- societies based on agriculture
- main asset is land
- most goods produced locally
- industrial societies
- main assets: raw materials, energy sources (coal and oil), markets
- mass production, standardization, synchronization, centralization (pyramidal integration)
- third wave societies
- main asset: information
- modularization, flexibility, small scale production becomes feasible, the speed of the economy increases
More details here:
http://www.criticalthink.info/Phil1301/Wave3lec.htm.
Toffler analyzes societies by dividing
them into a number of spheres: political, military, religious,
educational, cultural. He states that it is important to have such
spheres harmonized within one type of society. While our economy enters
the Third Wave, our political sphere is lagging behind and it fails
to fulfill its function. As an example of the inadequacy of our
political sphere he cites the “Pueblo
incident,” which is a result of overwhelming information
pressing on our political system. It seems that one high rank civil
servant found a 1000 pages report on his desk one morning and he was
forced to use it to assess the risk of the mission by noon. Our
current political system is modeled following an industrial era
mechanism: regular check through standardized mass voting, upward
filtering of representatives into parliament, committees and
government, concentration of power. The solution is to share the
public decision process among people. Toffler proposes the use of
Third Wave technologies to set up temporary flexible teams, real time
discussions, voting and polling.
